Meredith Sell

thinking

  • A lesson from history and the story of Ida B. Wells

    In school, we typically learn about the Civil War and emancipation, but Reconstruction—and the period following Reconstruction, when Jim Crow laws passed throughout the South—are typically overlooked. We don’t think about black Americans again until the Civil Rights Era, nearly a century after the Civil War. The true story of Ida B. Wells takes place

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  • Not Abandoned

    I will not leave you comfortless, Jesus says in John 14:18, in his last words to his disciples before his crucifixion. I will come to you.  Another translation says orphaned, instead of comfortless. I think you could also read it as abandoned. Over the last seven months, I’ve wrestled hard with isolation and loneliness. There’s

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  • The burden of knowledge

    I remember reading The Diary of Anne Frank in school. I remember reading Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place and fictional stories set during the Holocaust like Number the Stars. I remember reading those things with the not-quite-fully-realized idea that the Holocaust was a real thing that happened to real people. I distinctly remember Number the Stars and the Jewish

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  • What I don’t know

    The biggest thing I’ve learned in the two-plus years since I graduated college is how little I know about, really, anything. And this isn’t meant to be self-deprecating. The world is just so big and old and complicated that what little bits I know are pinpricks of light on a canvas the size of the universe.

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